High Performance Web Sites
High Performance Web Sites Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers By Steve Souders
September 2007
Pages: 168

| Table of Contents | Index | Sample Chapter | Forum | Colophon

Table of Contents

  1. Chapter 1 The Importance of Frontend Performance

    1. Tracking Web Page Performance

    2. Where Does the Time Go?

    3. The Performance Golden Rule

  2. Chapter 2 HTTP Overview

    1. Compression

    2. Conditional GET Requests

    3. Expires

    4. Keep-Alive

    5. There's More

  3. Chapter 3 Rule 1: Make Fewer HTTP Requests

    1. Image Maps

    2. CSS Sprites

    3. Inline Images

    4. Combined Scripts and Stylesheets

    5. Conclusion

  4. Chapter 4 Rule 2: Use a Content Delivery Network

    1. Content Delivery Networks

    2. The Savings

  5. Chapter 5 Rule 3: Add an Expires Header

    1. Expires Header

    2. Max-Age and mod_expires

    3. Empty Cache vs. Primed Cache

    4. More Than Just Images

    5. Revving Filenames

    6. Examples

  6. Chapter 6 Rule 4: Gzip Components

    1. How Compression Works

    2. What to Compress

    3. The Savings

    4. Configuration

    5. Proxy Caching

    6. Edge Cases

    7. Gzip in Action

  7. Chapter 7 Rule 5: Put Stylesheets at the Top

    1. Progressive Rendering

    2. sleep.cgi

    3. Blank White Screen

    4. Flash of Unstyled Content

    5. What's a Frontend Engineer to Do?

  8. Chapter 8 Rule 6: Put Scripts at the Bottom

    1. Problems with Scripts

    2. Parallel Downloads

    3. Scripts Block Downloads

    4. Worst Case: Scripts at the Top

    5. Best Case: Scripts at the Bottom

    6. Putting It in Perspective

  9. Chapter 9 Rule 7: Avoid CSS Expressions

    1. Updating Expressions

    2. Working Around the Problem

    3. Conclusion

  10. Chapter 10 Rule 8: Make JavaScript and CSS External

    1. Inline vs. External

    2. Typical Results in the Field

    3. Home Pages

    4. The Best of Both Worlds

  11. Chapter 11 Rule 9: Reduce DNS Lookups

    1. DNS Caching and TTLs

    2. The Browser's Perspective

    3. Reducing DNS Lookups

  12. Chapter 12 Rule 10: Minify JavaScript

    1. Minification

    2. Obfuscation

    3. The Savings

    4. Examples

    5. Icing on the Cake

  13. Chapter 13 Rule 11: Avoid Redirects

    1. Types of Redirects

    2. How Redirects Hurt Performance

    3. Alternatives to Redirects

  14. Chapter 14 Rule 12: Remove Duplicate Scripts

    1. Duplicate Scripts—They Happen

    2. Duplicate Scripts Hurt Performance

    3. Avoiding Duplicate Scripts

  15. Chapter 15 Rule 13: Configure ETags

    1. What's an ETag?

    2. The Problem with ETags

    3. ETags: Use 'Em or Lose 'Em

    4. ETags in the Real World

  16. Chapter 16 Rule 14: Make Ajax Cacheable

    1. Web 2.0, DHTML, and Ajax

    2. Asynchronous = Instantaneous?

    3. Optimizing Ajax Requests

    4. Caching Ajax in the Real World

  17. Chapter 17 Deconstructing 10 Top Sites

    1. Page Weight, Response Time, YSlow Grade

    2. How the Tests Were Done

    3. Amazon

    4. AOL

    5. CNN

    6. eBay

    7. Google

    8. MSN

    9. MySpace

    10. Wikipedia

    11. Yahoo!

    12. YouTube

  1. Colophon

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